The Caucasian Oak of Vestre Kirkegard

Measure this oak at chest height, where the tape is supposed to go, and you get about four metres. Measure it where the trunk is clean and you get 2.98. Both figures sit in the same register entry and neither is wrong. The reason is that it is a grafted tree. A Caucasian oak has been grafted onto a pedunculate oak rootstock, and low on the trunk it carries pads of epicormic growth, the knobbly clusters of small shoots that a graft often throws, which swell the circumference exactly where the measurement is meant to be taken. The 2.98 metres used here is the honest clear-trunk figure. What you will see is thicker than that and lumpy with it. Above the join it is straightforwardly a Quercus macranthera, an oak from the Caucasus and northern Iran with large, deeply lobed leaves and downy young shoots, standing 20.5 metres tall in section I of Vestre Kirkegård. Somebody besides the register thought it worth pointing at: Wonderful Copenhagen's own map of the cemetery marks it as tree number two on a walking guide to the place. The cemetery is free and open daily, from seven in the morning until seven in winter and ten in summer.